Marion Lucy Mahony was born in Chicago, Illinois. When she was a baby her family fled from the Great Fire that precipitated the architectural revolution in that city.
After the fire the family settled in Evanstop, a semi-rural enclave north of the city that had been founded by Unitarians.
When she was eleven her schoolteacher father died of a self administered dose of laudanum. Shortly afterwards their house caught on fire. Her mother, Clara subsequently took her five children to the west side of the city and qualified to become an elementary school principal.
In 1890, Anna Wilmarth, the daughter of one her mother’s friends paid for Marion’s fees so she could study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated in 1894, only the second woman to do so.
On returning to Chicago she worked for two years for her cousin, Dwight Heald Perkins, before moving to the office of Frank Lloyd Wright.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2022
- Last updated:
- 2022
